Poetry Friday - John Hollander's Double Dactyls

John Hollander - Imagine studying poetry with this man....

Last Saturday, when I heard that the poet John Hollander had died, I pulled several of his books off my shelves to look through them and think about his work, which I've grown to love more and more over the years. I had a flirtation with it early on, due to the double dactyl form he invented with Anthony Hecht, another favorite poet of mine. The flirtation deepened when I began to read his more serious work, which I recommend to everyone (just look at "Adam's Task.")   But today, I want to stay focused on those double dactyls.

The definition of a double dactyl sounds simple: eight lines of two dactyls each, arranged in two quatrains. The first line of the poem must be nonsense (like “Higgledy-piggledy” or “Jiggery-pokery”) and the second line must be a name; the fourth and eighth lines are dactyls followed by spondees, and they rhyme; and one line of the poem (often the 6th or 7th) must be a single six-syllable word. Of course, the killer in that list of must-haves is the six-syllable word in dactylic meter, and the whole poem hinges on how clever that word is. Some say that the word cannot have been used before (never, ever) in any other double dactyl. Here's a wonderful example by poet George Starbuck (whose work I take a look at in the August issue of Numero Cinq. ) Notice that Starbuck, not to be outdone by anyone in terms of technical control, comes up with two six-syllable words in that second stanza:

Higgledy piggledy
Fifty Columbuses,
Fifty times richer in
Trinkets and beads

Couldn’t provision the
Quinquecentennial
Memorabilia
Business’s needs.

Here is one of Hollander's own; it's typical of his light-verse with a dark twist: 

Higgeldy, piggeldy,

Anna Karenina

Went off her feed and just

Couldn't relax.

Then, quite ignoring the

Unsuitability,

Threw in the sponge and was

Scraped off the tracks.

And here is one where he actually wrote a double dactyl about how to write double dactls:

Self Reference 

Starting with nonsense words:
  ("Higgeldy-piggeldy"),
  then comes a name (making
  line number two);
Somewhere along in the 
  terminal quatrain, a
  didaktyliaios
  word and we're through. 

Hecht and Hollander published a whole book of these silly and delightful poems titled Jiggery Pokery, which inspired a whole generation of MFA students with equally silly souls (I include myself) to try their hand at them. I challenge readers of The Drift Record to write a double dactyl and leave it in the comments - in honor of John Hollander! Come on! Do it! Doesn't have to be about John Hollander or about anything specific to poetry - just a double dactyl about anyone (as long as that someone's name is dactylic!)

---------------------------

The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted this week by Betsy at I Think in Poems. Head over there to see what other people have posted.